The Wind From the East

by Almudena Grandes

  “But you don’t mind.”

  “Look, this is what we have, and it’s the best we can have.You’re very important to me, very important, because you’re the only one who loves me, apart from my daughter and Alfonso, who’s like another child.You’re the only one.And I don’t know why you do, frankly, because I’m a shit.” She paused, but still he said nothing. “I know I am, and I don’t understand how you can be in love with me, but I don’t want you to stop. If we lived together you’d stop loving me, Juan, you wouldn’t be able to stand me, I’m sure of it. I’ve often thought about it. It’s better this way. Believe me, it’s much better like this.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling in her own special way, the same sad look with which, years earlier, she’d refused a second slice of chocolate cake. “Yes. I know you better than you know me.You have no idea what I can do, what I can be. I love you, Juan, I can’t love anyone more than I love you. I don’t know why. But I know it’s not enough, that for you it wouldn’t be enough.”

  These words would haunt Juan Olmedo for the rest of his life. He would never be able to overcome them, not even when he became strong and cynical, an expert at handling his misfortune. He realized that her words were no more than a partial, inadequate explanation; another trap, another stage in the endless deception.That night, he shared more with Charo than they had ever had together—his pain, his helplessness, his anguish on discovering with selfish but joyful amazement that she too was capable of suffering and that she too was in pain. He couldn’t remember then how moved he had been by her faded, smudged lipstick, her lost look in the bustle of the Gran Vía that Sunday afternoon when they had gone to the cinema and she had confessed without words that she was unhappy. But having lost all hope of ever being happy himself, her unhappiness comforted him and bound him to her with a different tie, a terrible solidarity in common defeat.

  Juan Olmedo tried to get used to a different dream, a close horizon of small, immediate benefits, and known, calculated risks. But that didn’t last long either.That sleepless night was the apex of a roller-coaster ride, the summit, the point of a needle on which he would have preferred to remain impaled, because the fall was brutal, and there was no safety net. Charo forgot what she’d said.All the mirrors shattered, and Juan went on cutting his hands and feet on the shards. His life became an endless, intermittent break-up, the chronicle of a failure repeated a thousand times, because she still won all their bets even though, every time, she had to give him more in exchange.

  At a certain point, without realizing how it happened, Juan started to see something hysterical, pitiful, almost comical in his sister-in-law’s melodramatic reappearances. At a certain point he began to be flippant with her, smiling sympathetically, using the diminutive of her name, not getting up when she left. He didn’t think about it much, because he wanted to think less and less, but he sensed that the key to the process lay not in Charo, but in himself. Sometimes he felt as if his arteries were drying out, as if all moisture were leaving his shell of a body, fossilized by the endless waiting and the inconceivable concessions he’d had to make. By the implacable, temporary nature of his life and the utter destruction of his pride. But still he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t resist her—her body, her smell, her voice—or the tyrannical, incomprehensible decrees of her will.

  He couldn’t even do so that night, near the end. By then he’d started to judge the passing of time by his daughter’s age, not by her mother’s promises. He’d agreed to meet Charo at the same restaurant where she’d stood him up two nights earlier, and once again he was the first to arrive and sit at their table. She’d stood him up so many times it had almost become a habit, a ritual that exerted a mysterious influence over him.This was why he had chosen the same restaurant, where the waiters looked as sorry for him as they had forty-eight hours earlier, offering him a silent sympathy that had bothered him at first. Not any more. Now he felt a wretched satisfaction at displaying his wounds in public, as if it were pleasant having everyone know he was a fool. He didn’t really understand what was going on, and he didn’t like it, but he was used to beating himself up more tenaciously than she ever did. He no longer recognized himself and perhaps he was becoming someone else—someone who was harder, unhappier, a worse person but better suited to the way things were.

  That evening, however, Charo did turn up.Three-quarters of an hour late, by which time he’d already had more than half a bottle of red wine, and eaten all the bread and butter and olives. She turned up, and all the waiters glanced at him, impressed, suddenly knowing. Juan could almost feel the pats on his back. He watched her as she made her way to the table and sat down opposite him. She looked beautiful, if a little unwell. Maybe this was why she looked so attractive, because of the slight dark rings under her eyes and her sharp, almost gaunt cheeks. She seemed to have aged, though. That evening, Juan realized that Charo was starting to look older than she was, that she was aging fast.

  “Sorry,” she said when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything. “I was running late.”

  “Yes, two days late.”

  She laughed.

  “OK, well, I’m even more sorry, then. I’m mortified. Is that enough?”

  “I hope it was worth it, at least.”

  “Well . . .” She looked at him with that odious smile that said “I know that you know that I know you sleep with other women, and you know that I know that you know that I sleep with other men. Isn’t it great? Aren’t we marvelous, and wicked, and grown-up? Aren’t we having a wonderful time?” Juan felt a sudden, brutal urge to punch her in the face.“Actually, it wasn’t. I would have had a much better time with you. You’re the one I most enjoy being with, as you know.”

  She tried to take his hand but he moved it from the table.

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

  He didn’t want to answer, but the waiter’s arrival disguised his silence, which became heavier, more noticeable once the waiter had departed.

  “For God’s sake, Juan,” said Charo after a while. “I can’t believe that after eight years you still don’t know the score.You’re sulking like a little kid. I don’t know what’s the matter with you, you’ve been very strange lately.”

  Juan filled their glasses with wine but still said nothing, not just because he didn’t feel like talking, but because he realized that Charo was finding his silence hard to take, and was getting nervous, maybe about to make a mistake.

  “I suppose, all in all, it’s logical you’re jealous,” she went on, trying to sound casual. “Really, it’s as if you were my husband—it’s been so long since I slept with Damián anyway.”

  “Go to hell, Charito.”

  He’d said it quietly—really he’d been talking to himself—but she heard him clearly.

  “What?” Charo said, eyes wide with fury.“What did you say?”

  Juan Olmedo stood up slowly, took a ten-thousand-peseta note from his wallet, and calmly, carefully placed it on the table before saying, more loudly this time:

  “I told you to go to hell.” She flushed.The people at nearby tables were staring.The waiter had brought another bottle of wine and was about to show it to them, but stopped. Juan added:“Charito.”

  As he left the restaurant he glanced at his watch.Twenty minutes later his doorbell started ringing continuously. Charo stood there, weeping, her hair a mess, looking worse than Juan had ever seen her look. She tried to stuff a ten-thousand-peseta note into his mouth before flinging herself at him and starting to pummel him with her fists, screaming like a wild, frightened animal.

  “You’ll leave me when I tell you to! Is that clear?” Her mascara had run with her tears, forming thick black streaks down her face. Her nose was running and she was spitting out the words so furiously it seemed as if her teeth might fly out after them. “You’ll leave me when I say so! Idiot! Bastard! What do you bet, you’ll only leave me when I say so!”

  He failed to restrain her, to force
her to stop and think about what she was doing, to recover the last remnants of the lovely, special girl with lips of caramel whom he’d kissed at traffic lights in the Calle Francos Rodríguez after a shift in his father’s shop.And he also failed to hold on to himself, to resist the desire growing with every attack, every scratch, bite, punch she inflicted on him. He had desired her so much when she was at her best, but he now desired her even more when she was at her worst. He held her tight, and then slapped her hard. Instead of slapping him back, she laughed, and he kissed her, and put his arms around her, and caressed her, and possessed her from a place he’d never been before, feeling as if the floor were giving way beneath his feet. He accepted that he wanted to fall, to boil in the thick magma of the inferno into which Charo was dragging him, teaching him to despise her, and truly to despise himself.

  Yet he still loved her. He loved her and despised her. But he felt so tired, wrecked, worn out, unable to take one more step, to hold out his hand to her once again. So it was Charo who started to make the first move, to humiliate herself, doing all the running, showing him that she wanted to keep him. Juan couldn’t understand her, and he watched her circling, pretending that there was nothing wrong, that everything was fine, that they had something good. He didn’t even try to see her as he used to, with the innocent eyes of the simpleton. His were now predatory eyes that anticipated, with a shrewd malice born of resentment, every one of Charo’s moves—Charo, who made him feel utterly alone when she spoke, when she touched him, when she lay beside him.

  The end came quietly, discreetly, without fuss or warning.They were in bed, about to go to sleep; she stayed at his place often now, lavishing upon his indifference the gift of sleep that she used to be so cunningly sparing with. She talked about her other lovers, perhaps to goad him into jealousy.

  “Damián doesn’t know a thing,” she said. He wasn’t looking at her—perhaps that was why she chose this time to tell him. “He only knows about you.”

  “What?” Juan sat up and, turning towards her, grabbed her arm. “What do you mean he knows about me?”

  “Well, not that we’re still lovers, but he knows that we once had something together.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “He was driving me crazy one day, so I told him. He’s always done it himself, right from the start, he was always sleeping with one woman or another. He never made the slightest attempt to hide it.”

  That night, Juan Olmedo couldn’t sleep. He realized that he had never, ever, not even when Charo closed the door behind him for the first time, known what it was to be truly alone.

  “I can’t take any more, Charo,” he said at breakfast, looking straight at her, without hesitating, or hiding.“I can’t. I mean it this time. Don’t think of coming back. Don’t call me. Don’t bother to make yet another scene, because I’ve had enough. I can’t go on with this. I just can’t.”

  Charo realized that he meant it this time. She didn’t cry or scream. She didn’t take off her clothes or fling herself at him or try to drag him to bed.

  “You’ll regret this, Juan,” she said eventually, eyes dry, lips firm.“You’ll regret doing this to me. I know you’ll be sorry.What do you bet?”

  It was the last time she ever wagered with him, but she won the bet easily, just as she had won all the others. Juan Olmedo was never alone with her again until he saw her lying by the side of the old Galapagar road, her lifeless body covered by a thick, grey blanket, and then he realized what it was to be truly sorry.

  In mid-May, an optimistic east wind, moderate and brave, brought summer with it, spreading a salty joy of bare arms and cheeks tanned by the sun that felt like a victory over the persistent uncertainty of winter. In the south, the arrival of hot weather is a certainty, a guarantee of stability, a spontaneous scientific proof. The changeable weather that drives everyone mad ceases abruptly with the first blast of true heat. From then on, there is nothing but heat, the only variation a benevolent, refreshing foreign wind, or another drier wind, redolent of the desert.

  Juan Olmedo’s body welcomed the arrival of summer before his brain even had time to recognize it. At least this was what he thought when he at last managed to identify the insistent tingling that triggered nervous ripples just below the skin at the back of his neck, his arms and his legs. It was a Thursday afternoon, he was driving home from work on a road that shone like a mirror in the sun, and he was feeling uncomfortably hot. He took off his jacket, switched on the air conditioning, and this improved things slightly, but not enough. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to tire himself out. He watered the plants, tidied his desk, reorganized the junk room, hung all the tools that had gradually been dispersed throughout the house over the past few months back on their board, emptied all the wastepaper baskets, carried a couple of rubbish bags out to the bin and, once he’d done all this, decided not to go for an evening walk on the beach, but headed instead to the telephone.

  The woman he used as a babysitter was very happy to hear from him. He’d needed her only three or four times in the last few weeks, when he’d had to go out to dinner with colleagues, bonding sessions he’d gradually grown used to and even enjoyed, although he still felt a little reluctant to go, just as he always had back in Madrid. But these outings on Fridays or Saturdays were not the only way in which his life was becoming more settled, a process he found so disconcerting that he couldn’t enjoy it fully.When he was alone, a sudden mistrust, a poisoned gift from another time, another man’s memory, made him doubt everything that was happening, made him doubt what his senses were telling him. It was a need to regain control, regain faith in his senses, that prompted him to go to Sanlúcar that evening, to head down the path of beaten earth that seemed strangely unfamiliar considering it was only a couple of months since he’d last been there.The neon sign above the bar greeted him like an old friend, however.

  “How lovely to see you!” exclaimed Elia, playing the hurt, forsaken sweetheart as he came towards her.“I thought the earth had swallowed you up.”

  “I’ll go away again if you like,” he said very calmly, as he reached her side.

  “No, stay.”

  In an instant she went from sulking to being outrageously affectionate, and Juan couldn’t help comparing her silliness, her superficial skill, her profitable, practiced moves, with Maribel’s greedy surrender. It made her rise in his estimation, even compared to a woman who was younger and more attractive. While Elia purred and coiled herself around him, he glanced around the bar which was unusually full for a Thursday night. “Must be the wind,” he thought to himself, and then, because he was still thinking of Maribel when their drinks arrived, he took the opportunity to rid himself of the girl’s embrace. Leaning both elbows on the bar, he asked casually:“Do you happen to know someone from my town called Andrés? He used to deliver bread. I think they called him ‘Tasty Bread’ or something.”

  She smiled with only one side of her mouth and half closed her eyes.

  “Yes, of course I do,” she replied.“But they don’t call him that because he delivered bread. It’s because he’s so tasty.”

  “Right, well, doesn’t make any difference.” Juan smiled, and she smiled back.“He’s not here now, by any chance?”

  “He’s always here. He comes nearly every night. Only for a drink, though. He’s usually broke. He hasn’t got a regular job, but he gets work from time to time and then he has a real party. He’s the one over there, leaning against the pillar. See him? The one in the pink shirt.”

  Juan Olmedo looked, not realizing that the man had been watching him for some time. He now returned Juan’s gaze unflinchingly. He must have been about thirty, of average build, with dark-blond hair and the kind of doll-like face—clearly drawn eyebrows, large round eyes, small nose, fleshy lips—that usually graced male models.“He’s too old to pull off that teenage-heartbreaker look successfully,” Juan thought. He also thought he looked shorter than Maribel, which meant he wouldn’t reach above Juan’s sh
oulders. Just tall enough to impress an eleven-year-old girl. He smiled, so that the man would look away.

  “You’re fucking his wife, aren’t you?”

  Her comment made him start, and she noticed. He took a long sip of his drink, and thought a moment before answering. “First, she’s no longer his wife. Secondly, he doesn’t give a shit who she’s fucking. And thirdly . . .”“Yes, I am fucking her. So what?” he thought, but didn’t say it out loud, because he remembered how careful Maribel was about this, the strict, universal cautiousness that he found so disconcerting, especially since it was like the shame she might have expected him to feel, but which he didn’t.

  “Don’t call me ‘usted,’ Maribel, it’s too polite. Call me ‘tu,’” he remembered to say at last, the third time they slept together.

  “Why not?” She held him tighter under the sheets as a way of showing her gratitude for his request, although she didn’t intend to act on it. “Does it bother you?”

  “No, it’s not that. It doesn’t bother me, it just seems silly. It’s ridiculous that you use a formal way of addressing me when . . .” He tailed off and shrugged, smiling, hoping to convey the rest of the sentence that he didn’t want to say out loud—it’s ridiculous that you address me as “usted” with the same mouth you also use to suck my cock.